I took off my shoes to enter the theater space. My eyeglasses, too. The shoes were part of the ritual, but it turned out that An Ark, an augmented reality theater piece showcased at The Shed in New York City, uses Magic Leap 2 glasses. And those don’t work with my prescription. I put on contact lenses in the bathroom before the show.
In a carpeted room with dozens of people seated in the round, I put on the tethered pair of AR glasses. So did everyone else. We sat together while holographic performers, including famed actor Ian McKellen, manifested around us.
An Ark is an experiment, billed as “the first play created for mixed reality.” I’ve seen AR experiences in immersive showcases before this that I’d call plays of a sort. But the nearly 50-minute run time of An Ark is probably the longest I’ve continuously been in a Magic Leap 2 headset. By the end, the glasses felt a bit warm on my nose. I was ready to take them off.
My colleague Bridget Carey and I both attended An Ark, running at The Shed until April 4, on an extremely cold day a few weeks ago. I’m still thinking about it. The experience was haunting. Emotional, but cold. It felt like we were present at a live theater event, and yet there were no live actors there at all.
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Hallways and walls invite you into the experience at An Ark, preparing you for how to put on the headset.
What does this mean for the future of physical theater? I certainly don’t want live actors to go away. I don’t think that’s the intention of this play, either. The whole experience is presented as a memorial-like meditation on the liminal space after death.
Four (virtual) chairs appear in a semicircle in front of me, and one by one, the volumetrically captured actors appear. McKellen, Golda Rosheuvel, Arinzé Kene and Rosie Sheehy are hypnotizing as presences that feel like they’re sitting right across from me. It’s the eye contact, as Bridget says to me later. Also, it’s the sense of how they’re all battling for your attention.
My field of view on the glasses is only wide enough for about two of the four chairs. I turn my head back and forth to see what the others are doing. The actors talk to me, just to me, looking me in the eyes, imparting their stories: Do they know me? Do I know them?
Everyone in the theater space feels like they have these four actors seated across from them. It’s a simultaneous illusion. But I can’t see what anyone else is seeing: I just see them seated in a semicircle in front of me. That multiplicity might sound strange, but it succeeds here. It ends up feeling like we’re all bearing witness together.
We’re also sharing the same ambient audio. I realize this halfway through, that the full room sound I was hearing, of them being there with me, is also there for everyone. At least, I think we are. I’m pretty sure we are.
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I had to take my glasses off and put contact lenses in. Look closely, and you can see the virtual chairs I see in the lenses of the Magic Leap 2 headset, barely.
Why this felt profound… and messy
Even in 2026, I haven’t seen that many moments where augmented reality becomes a replacement for the real. AR glasses have a challenge that still has never been tackled: How do you make a virtual experience you see in the real world mesh safely and comfortably with everyone else who’s there, too, and who probably aren’t seeing exactly the same thing in their glasses?
Compounding the problem is that AR glasses aren’t something most people have much experience with. Mixed reality headsets like the Apple Vision Pro, the Samsung Galaxy XR and the current line of Meta Quest headsets can create mixed reality that feels like it’s in your space with you, but no one’s wearing those in public.
Magic Leap was an early innovator trying to make AR things happen. The producer of this show, Todd Eckert, was formerly the head of content development for Magic Leap.
He produced two other Magic Leap hardware-powered theater experiences in the past: The Life (in an art installation, featuring Marina Abramović) and Kagami (an AR concert piece made with Ryuichi Sakamoto). An Ark feels like an extension of the idea and a challenge for us to reckon with how we might accept the virtual presentation of real actors. It’s sort of an inversion of the current moment: While AI is throwing us so many videos of artificially generated people, here I saw a virtual presentation of very real acting. I felt the difference.
Setting up a closed theater event for shared moments like The Ark is a step in the right direction. But I also don’t know if this type of experience, over time, will still be interesting when the novelty of AR glasses is lost. Looking around, I got the feeling of people trying out tech they’d never really used before. Coming out of the 45-minute show and walking out a door to retrieve our stored shoes, I felt like I was emerging from a ritual.
Couldn’t I do this at home instead? Yes, but would it feel the same, me alone in my cluttered space without the joy of sharing it with others? That’s the thing. While this $45, 45-minute show required me to travel to the west side of Manhattan on a cold evening, it also let me feel togetherness virtually. We’re still not in a world where most people even have the hardware to make this happen, much less all gather to use it together.
But it’s also the performances, seen at an intimate distance, that made an impact. I’ve worked out with holographic trainers in the Meta Quest, but it does feel special to see this type of virtual presence in a clean, uncluttered space designed to receive it.
I’d love it more if I somehow didn’t need to bring my own contact lenses, but that’s the reality of smart eyewear right now. So few smart glasses are made to support all prescription types, and many don’t fit over glasses. The performance did offer prescription inserts to help people, but only up to -5. Bridget’s -6 prescription couldn’t be fully matched, either.
My “I’m at a real play” senses were activated, even though no live actors were actually there.
Afterward, oddly, a hunger for reality
What An Ark did do, though, is make me feel grounded in an experience in a real space. I remember being in that room, seeing the people. Taking my shoes off. Feeling present.
And in the show itself, as the four actors — angels or spirits between the worlds of life and death, perhaps — begin to share memories of lives once lived, ones that blend and melt and represent many people, perhaps I, too, felt like a message was being imparted to me. I passed through the door, leaving the show happy to be alive and glad to have made a journey to a place to see theater — even without the actors. Was that the whole idea? Maybe the ark is made of us.
I’ve found myself thinking more about the real world as I get deeper into personal wearable tech that tries to connect and transform the world around me. The real world is stable and tangible and rich. I want to pay attention to it. An Ark let me do that while also being virtual, which is magic in itself.
